Congratulations to the eagle-eyed Pressley Baird, who noted that the Trustees of the University of North Carolina Wilmington approved UNCW’s latest common-reading book at their meeting on Thursday (April 19).

That book is “Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President” by Eli Sasl0w, published last fall by Doubleday.

As part of its “Synergy” program. each year the university sends out a book to incoming freshmen to read over the summer before arriving on campus. All students, however, are urged to read it.

The Synergy title is used in UNCW’s First Year Seminar and other courses (at faculty discretion), and the campus plans a number of books around each one.

Last fall, the book was “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers. Previous selections include “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (2007), “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro (2008), “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” by Ishmael Beah (2009) and “No Impact Man” by Colin Beavan (2010).

Saslow, who writes for The Washington Post, noted that President Obama reads 10 handwritten letters from Americans each evening, culled from the million or more received by the White House. The 10 are not cherry-picked for content; the president reads quite a few beginning “Dear Jackass.” Many are handwritten, and subjects are all over the place.

Obama responds, also by hand, to many of these notes. He’s said that many of the letters are touching but also frustrating, since he wishes he could do more to help people in trouble.

Saslow spend a year tracking down the stories behind some of the people who wrote these letters, including a fourth-grader from a substandard school in Kentucky, a 911 dispatcher from Richmond, Va., whose son was deployed to Afghanistan and a chronically ill woman whose story he used in arguing for his health-care legislation.

The book traces what happened to these letter-writers and how Obama’s responses changed (or didn’t change) their lives.

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About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.